2019 Summer Internship Reports: Iakov Vasilyev

Each year, our Workforce Development team offers summer internships for students interested in developing their gateway development skills. Eligible participants are placed at one of several SGCI partner sites. We will be sharing some of the experiences of our 2019 student interns in a series of blog posts entitled SGCI Summer Internship Reports.

Featured below is SGCI summer intern Iakov Vasilyev, a junior at the University of California, San Diego.

"I am very happy I got to go through this internship. All my previous programming experience has been either theoretical or for homework and small projects. The internship introduced me to many new things that I have been hoping to learn hands-on for many years now."

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

My name is Iakov Vasilyev, I am a third-year data science student at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). I have always been fascinated with computers and the wide range of functionality they offer to anyone who knows how to code. I see data science as one of the most useful applications of computer science.

Where did your internship take place, and who did you work with?

My internship took place at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in San Diego, California. My advisor was Ilya Zaslavsky, who introduced me to SGCI and particularly to the Data Discovery Studio (DDS) project. DDS is a website that keeps metadata records of thousands of research publications. It allows the user to browse and search the records as well as to form collections out of them and then work with those collections using different platforms (e.g. JupyterHubs). The mission of the project is to make working with metadata easier by enhancing available tools as well as improving the quality of metadata itself.

What are some things that you learned as a result of this internship?

Over the course of this internship, I have probably learned more useful information than in many of my college classes. I got to see the inner workings of an actual established website and I had to learn all the tools I needed to work with it, including a lot of Javascript, different Java frameworks, and RESTful APIs. I had never dealt with the difficulty of inserting your code into someone else’s project, which turned out to be way more challenging than I thought. Besides getting good practice in programming, I also learned a lot about communicating with coworkers and advisors, asking for help whenever it is needed and offering help whenever I could.

Do you see yourself engaging with SGCI again in the future? Perhaps when you begin your career?

Yes, I would gladly work on another SGCI project. Everything in this internship has been genuinely interesting to me which made me enjoy working with DDS very much. I do not know where I want my career to begin yet, I definitely need to focus more on finishing college for now.

Anything else to add about your internship experience?

I am very happy I got to go through this internship. All my previous programming experience has been either theoretical or for homework and small projects. The internship introduced me to many new things that I have been hoping to learn hands-on for many years now.

Interested in a summer internship with SGCI, or know a student who might be interested? Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay updated on upcoming opportunities.

More than just everyday musings...

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation under award number ACI-1547611. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.